Word: tobacco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...happy week for the heads of the nation's tobacco companies. Former Brown & Williamson research chief Jeffrey Wigand, the industry's highest-level whistle-blower to date, began giving depositions to lawyers for the state of Mississippi, which is suing the industry to recoup the public-health costs it attributes to smoking. Though Brown & Williamson obtained a gag order on Wigand from the courts in Kentucky, where the firm is based, a Mississippi judge refused to honor the ruling...
Justice Department lawyers today deposed Jeffrey Wigand, the former tobacco company executive who told CBS' "60 Minutes" that his former employer, Brown & Williamson Tobacco, lied about the dangers of smoking. Fearing a lawsuit, CBS didn't air the interview. But Wigand, who has himself been sued by Brown and Williamson, is speaking with state and federal attorneys general about the company's decision to market products that it allegedly knew were carcinogenic. Neither Justice nor Wigand would comment about the talks today, but his testimony could devastate Brown and Williamson, which faces two Justice criminal investigations into whether its executives...
...bowdlerized version of the story (without the interview) a week ago, at the end of which correspondent Mike Wallace announced that he and his colleagues were "dismayed that the management at CBS had seen fit to give in to perceived threats of legal action against us by a tobacco-industry giant." Wallace, Morley Safer and other CBS newsmen continued to voice their concerns in print and TV interviews, raising alarms that CBS's corporate bosses might be getting weak-kneed in the face of aggressive (and potentially expensive) threats of libel. It was CBS journalists on their most impressive high...
...week, however, Hewitt and Wallace were no longer talking, after a published report suggested that CBS lawyers may have had legitimate cause for concern. According to the Wall Street Journal, 60 Minutes made a number of unusual arrangements with the tobacco-industry source--later revealed to be former Brown & Williamson executive Jeffrey S. Wigand. He was reportedly paid a $12,000 "consultant fee" for work he had done on a previous 60 Minutes segment; was promised that the network would indemnify him against any possible libel suit resulting from the story; and given a pledge that the interview would...
...contract with another. Attorneys are divided over whether the network could successfully have been sued on such grounds. By paying money to Wigand and agreeing to indemnify him against a lawsuit, some contended, CBS had put itself at serious risk. Attorneys who have been involved in litigation against the tobacco industry, however, insisted that the network was needlessly timid. "I think it's appalling they would fold over such an iffy theory of law," says John P. Coale, a Washington lawyer who represents 50 law firms pursuing a class action against tobacco companies...